This the Prelude to the five sections that I have culled out for the stories that made me the person I am today. (Brainwave, Note to SELF : This section and the successive sections will later be a part of my official Memoir, one day.) The Curtain Raiser offers a Sneak Peek in to the coming sections and tells you what to expect in each section, in random order. Of course who is to say, when those sections will actually be written and/or published..But atleast I have the main points down to cogitate on for starters!
Frangipani.
Like a sweet smelling frangipani looking at the world through her pink-tinted glasses.
I have forever been fascinated with the simplicity of the champa, the waft of its sugary floral fragrance and the bunch in which the beautiful flowers grow makes the flower seem like a pretty little lady,herding with her flock,still each standing uncomplicated,innocent and distinct in that bunch.They seem to be looking at the world in an unadulterated color, like their own.The rosy glasses,those that make everything seem pretty, everything in a hue tad better than its original shade.Through those, nothing seems wrong and you don't seem to mind anything or anyone.Those phases of life, where the body recognises only one emotion -- the mush.Not the love phase, the superlative of love phase-the romance phase.
As a child,I watched Dil, my first exposure to romance. Come to think of it now, that was quite inappropriate to expose a baby to that sort of romance!I fell in love with Aamir Khan AND Madhuri Dixit.For the longest time I thought they lived that romantic life in that small hut in the woods,singing love ballads. But then came Hum Aapke Hain Kaun with Salman and Madhuri, by which time I gathered that Aamir and Madhuri weren't married after all. So that soft spot for the flamboyant Prem(Salman) also made house in my heart.Sometime after that came Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge,which blew my mind off. Ok. Let me out a little secret today.If you have seen the movie too, you'd recall how Simran could hear Raj playing the guitar and that tune haunted her all the way to India, thousands of miles away from him.The intensity with which I revelled on these cheesy bollywood-rom-coms was SO high, that I remember sitting in my class with that music haunting me like it haunted Simran.Obviously,our love for Shahrukh was established in the same manner, as our tipping points were exactly the same- the haunting tune.
THAT was not the story of my romance.That was my story of how I learnt what romance was,only from the best of the best we have ever seen, the Khans, of our times! So for a rosy glasses-clad girl, who learns from the best, life doesn't become any easier, as what I began with in terms of expectations, was far from reality.
My Higher Education wasn't any less too,already breeding on a heavy dosage of Jane Austen classics and Harlequin, Mills & Boons fantasy world,I graduated to Hollywood which opened a while new series of mush to my mush hungry-mind.Then there were the Pretty Womans,the Notting Hills, the You've got Mails,the Harry met Sallys followed by a barrage of series like Friends,Grey's Anatomy and what not..FULL EXPOSURE TO POTENTIALLY LETHAL-FOR-THE-MIND STUFF CONTINUES TILL DATE.
Emerald
Discipline : My Bijoux.
Very early on in life, when I was probably still walking wobbly, I was put in dance school because my parents had seen some ingrained talent in me.And how grateful I am to them for this, among other things! We come from a school of thought that believes in formal training from the best available resources in all forms of talent. I subsequently went to an array of classes for dance, music, painting, swimming, sports, the summer camps of a variety of things like archery,shooting, they even inculcated praying to be inculcated as a habit in a child. We ere exposed to a lot of stuff in our growing up years. I stuck to dance for dear life, when the times became tougher with studies etc. and if that has taught me anything today, it is that talent is a waste if its not coupled with discipline. I have done the same step over and over again till my feet were sore, for hours at end physically and non-stop in my head, till the time I have got it just right. The complexities of the posture of the body, the exact bent of a hand for a mudra to look natural, the effort that goes into effortless dancing, the expressions, the fluid eye and body movements and above all the timing when all of it has to come together to make that experience perfect- is not even imaginable without a 101% honest discipline and ruthless dedication. I literally spared nothing when it came to my dance, be it for the smallest dance performance for myself in front of my dressing table mirror or for the largest audience I have performed in front of. ALL my performances have to perfect to the best of my capabilities. That's my unsaid and unwritten promise in blood to myself. And the discipline for it comes from within. That's what it is has taught me for life as well, if you perform and do it half-heartedly, it will never come through the way it should. Talent can't stand ground alone. But when it gets coupled with hard work, that's when its shows.
Dance for me is divine. And I know this might sound weird, but I could sense very early on in life that it gets me face-to-face with the inexplicable and transports me to a place that seems tranquil beyond words. That, I'm guessing how the world defines divine. That gives me my centre by completely smashing me off my centre.Its my form of Bhakti and its my form of joy. I owe every morsel of the discipline in my being to dance. Its given me not only my divine place but a way of life. Its my Sorcerer's Stone, my jewel and my biggest strength.
Emerald traces the story of the perhaps the most precious bijoux that I possess, through the incidents that taught me much much more than the discipline of it all.Through it I have had revelations not only about others but myself too. Some of my toughest and the smoothest times have all laid in this one field for me.
Orchids
Being Born to the Purple.
I don't mean to sound overly proud or pompous when I say the idiom so decisively, the only thing that I mean is that to me that's what my family is. I see my family as the epitome of -- everything. To me they are the most aristocratic, graceful, respectful, happy, cheerful, honest, regal, responsible,funny, dependable, loving, doting, clean-heart-ed, pure, thoughtful, righteous, just the right mix of baroque and contemporary and I could really go on! I have no shame in admitting that I afford an exaggerated sense of ALL the good in the world to my family. They are and will be all that I look up to, love and live. I know for a fact that there are many who are above me as a person and must have gotten a lot more than what I was taught. But if I had just one wish for my next life- I'd know exactly what to ask for.
Orchids will features the times of my being spoilt- silly and endlessly doted. I will give my parents a tough time. I will fail and be trained in dealing with the most important aspect of life- failure. I will see my parents go through certain things that make me feel so protective of them that it felt like being a parent to them. I will do something tiny and see my family feel so proud like that's the genesis of atom that I've cracked. And above all, I will know what unadulterated love, really means.
Champagne
For the family I chose.
Friendship has not only taught me things, it has been one of the biggest blessings in life. For me my friendships have all flavours of yellow in them, all of them switch their bandwidths in different situations and become different things.Sometimes they are smooth like the lemon chiffon cake, sometimes they are are pungent but necessary like the flavour of the mustard, sometimes they give the pop of bright colour to life like the canary and some other times the dark side of the earth like the ochre.Sometimes they soothe like the pastel yellow and sometimes they are all you want for peace to prevail in your world, like the butter-cream frosting.All of them, are exactly what the sparkle is to the vino, like that champagne- they are the sparkle of my life. And that's my toast to this brilliant life, for now and forever.
Ivory & Charcoal
Faith & its foes..
My belief system has been one which wraps itself around the thing called faith. Faith in the Super Power. Faith in Karma . Faith in the family and its love. Faith in the process. Faith in time. And because there is an overload of eternal optimism, as you can see, in my system, I somehow manage, despite the oddest of the odds in life, to scramble faith - in myself. The most important of all faiths. The one that lay in yourself. On the basis of which you listen to that one little voice in your interiors and keep going, head-long, at whatever you do, with full force. That for me is the purest form of self-motivation, of driving yourself in the direction your life is meant to go.Without this faith, you can't stir the ship in the right direction, on the pitch black stormy night in the sea. It is the ONLY that makes you take the first step, of anything.
That is what drives me in life. The belief that the world straightens itself, after the messiest tragedy it gets hit by.That we recuperate and things happen for a reason. That whatever prevails is for the best and in the greater good. Its so difficult to write the prelude to this section , without sounding like a preachy- baba or guru-ma of some sort. But it is what it is. I've had enough examples in my life of what happens when I put all my faith in something that I have done my best at and leave the rest to my God/Karma/Universe/Whatever you would like to call it. The end result is always was the best. I don't want to jinx this whole thing going on between me and my uber cool-Universe, but sometimes the result is something that I didn't even know I could get, it exceeds my expectations from myself. That's how I have raised the bar for myself in many things.
I have asked for what I wanted, with all my heart and all my might and the Universe has conspired,somehow using its secret super powers,to make my wish come true.
The whole law of this Faith business, has its loopholes al right! There have been things in my life, where I have been faced with situations, where I would wish for something with more than all my heart and more than all my might and still NOT get it. Instances that haunt and do not leave me like the ghosts of the past. Events I wish never occurred, things I would have loved to do differently, circumstances I wish others would have tackled differently. Things that happened despite the beautiful pure faith laid in them.Incidents that have taken place and cannot be undone. Those that give pain, anger, frustration and a sense of helplessness that reminds you of your mere human nature. The fact that everything that you wish for does not always come true. There is always an energy that does its own things and leaves you to recuperate and regain yourself from the aftermath. The hard reality of some things in life, being absolutely out of your control, which can never be stopped with any amount of effort you put in them, hits you like its the Universe ascertaining its position in your blind faith-adorned life.
As much as I have had the experiences with my faith getting strengthened at every step, I have had to face some situations I never wished to have been in, in the first place. No matter how much I didn't want to be in that place, I did in fact, face them and got shattered, dwindled in my head struggling with my fading faith and then somehow with time regained that faith back to it original place.
These are incidents which introduced my ivory faith to the charcoal human existence and how they both exist like yin and yang, simultaneously in the world.
Some stories I narrate here might seem minuscule in front of the preachy and boisterous prelude to them but these are the things that established certain definite beliefs in me and that is what sets them apart from all the other stories I have lived in my life.
Frangipani.
Like a sweet smelling frangipani looking at the world through her pink-tinted glasses.
I have forever been fascinated with the simplicity of the champa, the waft of its sugary floral fragrance and the bunch in which the beautiful flowers grow makes the flower seem like a pretty little lady,herding with her flock,still each standing uncomplicated,innocent and distinct in that bunch.They seem to be looking at the world in an unadulterated color, like their own.The rosy glasses,those that make everything seem pretty, everything in a hue tad better than its original shade.Through those, nothing seems wrong and you don't seem to mind anything or anyone.Those phases of life, where the body recognises only one emotion -- the mush.Not the love phase, the superlative of love phase-the romance phase.As a child,I watched Dil, my first exposure to romance. Come to think of it now, that was quite inappropriate to expose a baby to that sort of romance!I fell in love with Aamir Khan AND Madhuri Dixit.For the longest time I thought they lived that romantic life in that small hut in the woods,singing love ballads. But then came Hum Aapke Hain Kaun with Salman and Madhuri, by which time I gathered that Aamir and Madhuri weren't married after all. So that soft spot for the flamboyant Prem(Salman) also made house in my heart.Sometime after that came Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge,which blew my mind off. Ok. Let me out a little secret today.If you have seen the movie too, you'd recall how Simran could hear Raj playing the guitar and that tune haunted her all the way to India, thousands of miles away from him.The intensity with which I revelled on these cheesy bollywood-rom-coms was SO high, that I remember sitting in my class with that music haunting me like it haunted Simran.Obviously,our love for Shahrukh was established in the same manner, as our tipping points were exactly the same- the haunting tune.
THAT was not the story of my romance.That was my story of how I learnt what romance was,only from the best of the best we have ever seen, the Khans, of our times! So for a rosy glasses-clad girl, who learns from the best, life doesn't become any easier, as what I began with in terms of expectations, was far from reality.
My Higher Education wasn't any less too,already breeding on a heavy dosage of Jane Austen classics and Harlequin, Mills & Boons fantasy world,I graduated to Hollywood which opened a while new series of mush to my mush hungry-mind.Then there were the Pretty Womans,the Notting Hills, the You've got Mails,the Harry met Sallys followed by a barrage of series like Friends,Grey's Anatomy and what not..FULL EXPOSURE TO POTENTIALLY LETHAL-FOR-THE-MIND STUFF CONTINUES TILL DATE.
Emerald
Discipline : My Bijoux.
Very early on in life, when I was probably still walking wobbly, I was put in dance school because my parents had seen some ingrained talent in me.And how grateful I am to them for this, among other things! We come from a school of thought that believes in formal training from the best available resources in all forms of talent. I subsequently went to an array of classes for dance, music, painting, swimming, sports, the summer camps of a variety of things like archery,shooting, they even inculcated praying to be inculcated as a habit in a child. We ere exposed to a lot of stuff in our growing up years. I stuck to dance for dear life, when the times became tougher with studies etc. and if that has taught me anything today, it is that talent is a waste if its not coupled with discipline. I have done the same step over and over again till my feet were sore, for hours at end physically and non-stop in my head, till the time I have got it just right. The complexities of the posture of the body, the exact bent of a hand for a mudra to look natural, the effort that goes into effortless dancing, the expressions, the fluid eye and body movements and above all the timing when all of it has to come together to make that experience perfect- is not even imaginable without a 101% honest discipline and ruthless dedication. I literally spared nothing when it came to my dance, be it for the smallest dance performance for myself in front of my dressing table mirror or for the largest audience I have performed in front of. ALL my performances have to perfect to the best of my capabilities. That's my unsaid and unwritten promise in blood to myself. And the discipline for it comes from within. That's what it is has taught me for life as well, if you perform and do it half-heartedly, it will never come through the way it should. Talent can't stand ground alone. But when it gets coupled with hard work, that's when its shows.
Dance for me is divine. And I know this might sound weird, but I could sense very early on in life that it gets me face-to-face with the inexplicable and transports me to a place that seems tranquil beyond words. That, I'm guessing how the world defines divine. That gives me my centre by completely smashing me off my centre.Its my form of Bhakti and its my form of joy. I owe every morsel of the discipline in my being to dance. Its given me not only my divine place but a way of life. Its my Sorcerer's Stone, my jewel and my biggest strength.
Emerald traces the story of the perhaps the most precious bijoux that I possess, through the incidents that taught me much much more than the discipline of it all.Through it I have had revelations not only about others but myself too. Some of my toughest and the smoothest times have all laid in this one field for me.
Orchids
Being Born to the Purple.
I don't mean to sound overly proud or pompous when I say the idiom so decisively, the only thing that I mean is that to me that's what my family is. I see my family as the epitome of -- everything. To me they are the most aristocratic, graceful, respectful, happy, cheerful, honest, regal, responsible,funny, dependable, loving, doting, clean-heart-ed, pure, thoughtful, righteous, just the right mix of baroque and contemporary and I could really go on! I have no shame in admitting that I afford an exaggerated sense of ALL the good in the world to my family. They are and will be all that I look up to, love and live. I know for a fact that there are many who are above me as a person and must have gotten a lot more than what I was taught. But if I had just one wish for my next life- I'd know exactly what to ask for.
Orchids will features the times of my being spoilt- silly and endlessly doted. I will give my parents a tough time. I will fail and be trained in dealing with the most important aspect of life- failure. I will see my parents go through certain things that make me feel so protective of them that it felt like being a parent to them. I will do something tiny and see my family feel so proud like that's the genesis of atom that I've cracked. And above all, I will know what unadulterated love, really means.
Champagne
For the family I chose.
Friendship has not only taught me things, it has been one of the biggest blessings in life. For me my friendships have all flavours of yellow in them, all of them switch their bandwidths in different situations and become different things.Sometimes they are smooth like the lemon chiffon cake, sometimes they are are pungent but necessary like the flavour of the mustard, sometimes they give the pop of bright colour to life like the canary and some other times the dark side of the earth like the ochre.Sometimes they soothe like the pastel yellow and sometimes they are all you want for peace to prevail in your world, like the butter-cream frosting.All of them, are exactly what the sparkle is to the vino, like that champagne- they are the sparkle of my life. And that's my toast to this brilliant life, for now and forever.
Champagne charts what I call the graph of my success in life.One should consider oneself lucky, if he/she has been able to surround themselves with people who alleviate their levels in life. I will be blessed with the greatest friendship known to mankind.I will,very early in life, see each of my friends- a group of people at one point of time, turn their backs on me. Not once but twice.I will see what happens when I excel in something and also what happens when I fail at the other.
This edition is hand picked. The characters and also the their connotations and their importance in my life. No matter who taught me what, I write only after ascertaining the right to write all this. These are human errors according to me, which come as lessons sometimes. So cut me some slack my friends, like I have, for even I am human like all of you lovely people. To the family I have chosen for myself - who won't sue me for writing this.Ivory & Charcoal
Faith & its foes..
My belief system has been one which wraps itself around the thing called faith. Faith in the Super Power. Faith in Karma . Faith in the family and its love. Faith in the process. Faith in time. And because there is an overload of eternal optimism, as you can see, in my system, I somehow manage, despite the oddest of the odds in life, to scramble faith - in myself. The most important of all faiths. The one that lay in yourself. On the basis of which you listen to that one little voice in your interiors and keep going, head-long, at whatever you do, with full force. That for me is the purest form of self-motivation, of driving yourself in the direction your life is meant to go.Without this faith, you can't stir the ship in the right direction, on the pitch black stormy night in the sea. It is the ONLY that makes you take the first step, of anything.
That is what drives me in life. The belief that the world straightens itself, after the messiest tragedy it gets hit by.That we recuperate and things happen for a reason. That whatever prevails is for the best and in the greater good. Its so difficult to write the prelude to this section , without sounding like a preachy- baba or guru-ma of some sort. But it is what it is. I've had enough examples in my life of what happens when I put all my faith in something that I have done my best at and leave the rest to my God/Karma/Universe/Whatever you would like to call it. The end result is always was the best. I don't want to jinx this whole thing going on between me and my uber cool-Universe, but sometimes the result is something that I didn't even know I could get, it exceeds my expectations from myself. That's how I have raised the bar for myself in many things.
I have asked for what I wanted, with all my heart and all my might and the Universe has conspired,somehow using its secret super powers,to make my wish come true.
As much as I have had the experiences with my faith getting strengthened at every step, I have had to face some situations I never wished to have been in, in the first place. No matter how much I didn't want to be in that place, I did in fact, face them and got shattered, dwindled in my head struggling with my fading faith and then somehow with time regained that faith back to it original place.
These are incidents which introduced my ivory faith to the charcoal human existence and how they both exist like yin and yang, simultaneously in the world.
Some stories I narrate here might seem minuscule in front of the preachy and boisterous prelude to them but these are the things that established certain definite beliefs in me and that is what sets them apart from all the other stories I have lived in my life.
